by uberge3k » 05 May 2012, 18:14
Transcripts from interviews with engineers from each faction.
UEF:
"Our mission statement when designing the UEF Army was 'We don't need no fancy technological tomfoolery. Just add more armor.' Unfortunately, there are logical limits to the amount of armor one can reasonably put on each unit before it crushes itself from its own mass and creates a black hole. So we bent our rule a bit, and made shields for everything to compensate!"
- Land:
"Two words: "MOAR ARMOR". We don't need speed or DPS when we can survive everything but a nuke to the face. If your stuff is still dying for some reason, add addition shields until that stops happening. There was some confusion about that out in the field, so we added it to the manual right here."
- Air:
"Ok, I'll be honest. I wasn't on that team. There were budget cuts and mandatory crunch at the end, so our standards ended up being something along the lines up 'It flies, yes? Ok, we're good then. *ticks something off on clipboard*' Fortunately, our enemies don't really care about air either."
- Navy:
"*squeals a bit* Ohhh boy, I LOVED working on navy. Cannons. More cannons. More cannons until this thing is in danger of sinking. Then we added a few more cannons just for the heck of it, and no one noticed! Also, we ran out of room for more armor because of those cannons, so we made you this shield boat so you can shield your shields while shielding things. If this were a game, you might even call that sort of thing "ultra powdered" or whatever you kids call it nowadays. But here at UEF R&D, we're in the business of WINNING. And win we did."
- Exps:
"Who needs exps? I mean, seriously; add more shields to whatever you're currently building. Though we made this Fatboy so you can troll heavily defended areas with long range bombardment. Since we had some extra budget for this, we even slapped a factory on the back, just to prove that we could do it (okay, I did it to win a bet - easiest five credits I've ever made!).
Right. The Novax. Look, I told management 100 times that it simply wouldn't work; that there was too much energy lost in sending a beam FROM ORBIT onto something on the planet's surface. But noooo. Bob in upper management promised the generals over at HQ that he had "A GIANT LAZOR FROM TEH OUTER SPACES" and he didn't want to look bad, since most of those generals are pretty buff looking... and the whole "commands vast armies" thing too. Anyway, after the specs went into production, that entire department was fired. I narrowly escaped by insisting that I was only a janitor, and then showing off the cool work I did on the Mavor; got rehired at twice my old pay! There's a lesson here kiddo: size really does matter, especially when it comes to ginormous cannonry that can oneshot anything from halfway across the planet."
Cybran:
"We're constantly on the move to avoid our enemies. The Cybran army was designed with the principle of winning as quickly as possible, and, failing that, being as annoying to kill as possible. Sure, you'll probably die at the end, but your job is to protect the Node you were assigned to, and give them as much time to escape as possible - and if that means making the ultimate sacrifice, that's a statistical risk we're willing to let you take."
Land:
"Remember, you aren't supposed to be detected. The Cybran ACU has less armor and a worse upgrade path than other factions, but that's to accommodate the expensive stealth add-ins - and to reduce gate transportation costs. Besides, the only thing we're risking is your life, and there's approximately eleventy billion people lined up after you to take your place. Everyone wants to be an ACU pilot.
Regarding the rest of the land; really, the Loyalist was the one good idea we had. Everything else, we just don't have the resources to adequately develop. Take the firing algorithms for example. We just couldn't get that to work in the design limitations we had. Other factions have artillery that can hit a stationary target sometime that day; we couldn't get that to work, so we threw a token EMP effect on it and called it good. Sure, our T2 land fires into the ground more often than not; but on the flipside, we have the lowest number of accidental casualties from attack-ground-ing PDs at annoying teammates of any faction. And up until now our stratagem has been "hope the enemy gets scared because OMG LAZERS", and it's worked!"
Air:
"Stealth is cool. Sadly it's more or less useless because you can have air more or less everywhere to counter it; but what if that stealth is in the air itself? Then things get far more interesting. Unfortunately, we took so much time perfecting mobile aerial radar stealth, that we forgot the aiming bug again. Hence you have gunships and fighter/bombers that quite literally could not hit the broad side of a barn. So we just split their projectiles up, and billed the units as "low intensity crowd suppression technology". So far people have bought it."
Navy:
"We were 90% done with Cybran tech when some annoying intern came in and pointed out that some planets had water on them. Everyone in the meeting stared at him for a solid 30 seconds before he elaborated "err, um, commanders might want to build units on water, maybe?..." and shuffled out. So yeah, it was a rush job. It worked out well enough now. Though as a courtesy we did send a memo out to all commanders that "if you really must make navy, win navy in the first 5 minutes or you'll probably die". We believe in pulling no punches when it comes to informing our troops that they will most likely die in a thermonuclear explosion due to our ineffective engineers."
Exps:
"Lasers. Who doesn't love them? We made the MonkeyLord SpiderBot (don't ask, 5 different people all had their hearts set on names... devolved into fisticuffs before the brass came to this compromise, so that the entire staff didn't kill each other) into the ultimate laser fanboy dream. But to accommodate its massive laser, we had to cut back on things like armor, and yes we kind of fudged the numbers on carbon emissions. Come on, running a GIANT LAZER takes a lot of energy! So what if it belches toxic smoke from its rear end? We just put protocols in place so that no one builds MLs on planets that we like, or otherwise might want to breathe on later.
Oh yeah, the Scathis. Same old targeting bug. But let's be honest, it just looks so cool in action that no one really cares that it doesn't do much.
The Soul Ripper... Well, most of our budget went to figuring out that cool name. We basically duct taped a few hundred gunships together for the actual unit. It flies, so it technically met all of our requirements."
Aeon:
"'The Aeon Illuminati Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet, Consectetur Adipiscing Elit' is an elite group of ultra-elite elites. We pride ourselves primarily on our eliteness, and secondly on our eliteness. Thirdly, we're also pretty elite. Our designius principalia throughout the army creation process has been "how can we make ourselves feel even more elite"?"
Land:
"The Aurora is the pinnacle of elitey elitism. Our super elite pilots undergo intensive training using the finest and clickiest techniques to micro this excellent unit to kill virtually unlimited numbers of other factions' pathetic excuses for tanks. The only way you can possible lose is if the terrain is uneven or if you forget to micro them; the latter case is grounds for immediate expulsion from the Aeon Super Elite. We really hate it when that happens because then we have to change all of our secret handshakes.
Because we are elite and like elite things, we also developed floating flaks and floating shields. We also made the Harbinger (of Doom), a unit which requires no micro at all to be ridiculously effective - this is a "Thank You" to our Super Elite Pilots who, if they get far enough in a battle to make harbs, deserve a break and the ability to use their newfound free time to rant about The Way to their victims."
Air:
"Carrying on with our ultra elite philosophy, we made T2 ints, which are exactly like T1 ints except better. They guarentee air domination to the eliteyelite who can micro them.
We designed the Mercy as the ultimate IQ test to determine whether or not we should attempt to capture and convert enemy commanders. We could have easily given it armor that was 50x stronger, but instead we intentionally designed it to be as weak as possible, and thus counterable by literally any token amount of defenses. Simply put, if you die to Mercies, you really are far too dense to bother with and deserved the firey cleansing that the unit delived."
Navy:
"We have floating land. There's really not much point to navy, at all, at least until the delicious Missile Ships. This unit's design principle came from studying our enemy's technology, specifically the UEF. They seemed to like missiles a LOT, but the poor overgrown apes simply couldn't figure out how to do it properly. We did. The result is something I like to call 'IN-YOUR-FACE MISSLEGEDDON APOCOLYPSIA 9000'. It's a shame that we couldn't fit all that in the space alloted for unit names."
Exps:
"Our exps were designed primarily with trolling in mind. Take the Galactic Collosus; the inspiration came from a pilot coming to us and saying "I want to be able to crush ACUs without risking chipping a nail on my own ACU". The initial design didn't even have a laser in it; that came later. I mean, really - you have auroras. You don't need any other land units. So it was just a glorified stomping machine at first, until we figured out that lasers are pretty cool and we should add one just for the heck of it.
The CZAR is perhaps the ultimate troll unit. See, we found it annoying that other factions sometimes used shields to protect themselves. They took time to counter, since no one ever remembers to build shield disruptors. So we took the same principle as the Mercy, removed its weaknesses, and scaled it up into a giant frisbee that you fling in the general direction of the stuff that you want to crush. Shields can't block 10 tons of flaming wreckage! And then we added a laser to it, to throw people off track - they'd be all 'uh oh, giant floating laser that reminds me of that one movie, I'd better kill it asap!'. And then they do, and its true mode engages, and flattens whatever was underneath it. HeehohohohehehaahahahaSNORT"
Seraphim:
"We are a group of invincible aliens with unlimited knowledge and power, here to crush the pathetic 'humies'. We could just as easily send a giant nuke to their galaxy and kill them all in one fell swoop, or create units which are completely impervious to all of their laughable weapons, but the truth is that we get bored rather easily. So we try to dumb our units down enough that they have at least a half a chance of actually hurting us, so we maximize the adrenaline rush when we crush the life out of them via our superior brains."
Land:
"This was tricky. Our initial specs had a giant microwave lazor and an infinite supply of nukes built on the ACUs from the start. They also reflected all damage back to the shooter, and could survive a direct orbital strike and a nuclear missile - at the same time. We realized that this would be far too easy, so we had to scale things back quite a ways. It's still awesome, but only slightly more awesome than the units that those pitiful worms use.
However, I simply couldn't bring myself to make any changes to my beloved Fobo. It was a work of sheer perfection. After that we really didn't even need any other land units, at all, but we went ahead and made some cool ones anyway. I'm especially pround of the Ishiavohahahuhohouothaha. See, my idea was, we just make 1 ultra cool unit in each class, and then we don't make any other specialized units like other noob engineers might. It worked really well, and the math-impaired hu-mons have even deluded themselves into believing that lack of units makes us weaker. Man, I just never get tired of that one - they actually believe it!"
Air:
"Why fix what isn't broken? I took a break and simply went ctrl-c ctrl-v on another faction's air units, cut out some ones I didn't like, and called it a day."
Navy:
"We created the most devious invention ever. A subresible destroyer. That's right, it's a subhunter, OR a destroyer, whenever you want it! And thanks to our undodgeable beam weapons it's impossible to outmicro. Our cruiser has best-in-class flak batteries to slay air, plus rapid fire PEWPEWPEW missiles! And once again the humies think we're weak, simply because we have fewer units than they do. Well our units are awesome and all of yours suck by comparison, so there! MWUAHAHAHA.
And as if that wasn't enough, we created the ultimate naval terror: The T3 Submarine. Designed exclusively for slaughtering everything that's in the water, AND anything in the air above them, these wonders will guarentee you naval control. And yet we have still convinced the hu-mons that we have terrible navy!"
Exps:
"Ok, we really couldn't hold back our awesomeness here. The Ythotha is the pinnacle of experimental humie-pwnzorzing perfection. It combines rapid fire weaponry for killing t1 units that noob-humies leave, with slow firing splash damage weapons for killing t1 units that noob-humies leave along with everything else. If it dies for some reason (usually to lull the enemy into a false sense of security while you toy with it some more), it deploys a destructive ball of destructive destruction, murdering anything and everyone nearby.
The Ahwassa is the ultimate air experimental. Hu-mon bombers typically drop piddly little "low yield tactical nukes" with their quaint little bombers. They're cute. The mighty Ahwassa drops a full nuclear warhead.
Speaking of nukes, you've probably heard of the Yolona Oss. This is what we use when we want something extra-extra dead. Quickly gating in an infinite supply of ultra nukes (which are exactly like the pathetic nukes you use, except twice as good), it will overwhelm any feeble defenses and ensure hasty destruction to whatever we happen to dislike at the moment. In other words, it adds a very literal "I Win" button to the console of whomever builds it.
Ze_PilOt wrote:If you want something to happen, do it yourself.
).
(doesn't apply to enemy aircraft 
